Since June, IndyCAN leaders and clergy attended three regional day-long retreats, launching Sacred Conversations on Race & Faith in 29 congregations across central Indiana. If yours was not one of them, there is still time to attend: Our final retreat is this Saturday.

The Season of Encounter retreats are designed to equip congregations to build strong relationships across race lines and understand the impact of race and structural racism on families in Indianapolis.

Participating congregations are holding hundreds of sacred conversations throughout the community in the coming weeks, allowing the people here to build relationships across race, both within and across our congregations. The conversations encourage community members to weigh in on a set of racial-equity strategies that IndyCAN will share with mayoral candidates at a public forum this fall.

IndyCAN meets with Governor Pence to urge keeping families together

“The biggest challenge facing the church today is the separation between faith and life. In our society, we are encouraged to privatize our faith; what IndyCAN encourages is that our faith should guide our lives. Exodus 22 teaches us that we shall not persecute the foreigner in our midst."

A delegation of IndyCAN immigrants, returning citizens and faith leaders met with Indiana Governor Mike Pence in July, in an effort to take steps to keep families together.

The delegation of the Indiana Campaign for Citizenship, a project of IndyCAN & the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, represents 17 of the largest faith denominations in Indiana, as well as business leaders and law enforcement officials, who urged Governor Pence to withdraw Indiana from the lawsuit that challenges the deferred action programs President Obama announced in November 2014. Those programs would have provided relief for 5 million aspiring Americans.

"A few months ago, I got in a minor traffic accident. Even though I wasn't at fault, when I saw the approaching lights of the police car, I was paralyzed with terror. I looked back at my sleeping baby and wondered, 'What will I do if they take me away because of my immigration status?' If deferred action had gone through as planned in February, I and 43,000 other Hoosiers would be able to come out of the shadows and no longer live in fear."

At the meeting, Governor Pence committed to attend a public meeting hosted by IndyCAN in the fall of 2016 and to continue working with IndyCAN to protect families, reduce over-incarceration of people of color and improve the pathways to family sustaining jobs.

"The penal system was created to establish reformation, not retribution. ... I want Indiana to be the best state in the country to get a second chance."

JOBS NOT JAILS UPDATE Our work to end mass incarceration continues behind the scenes

After helping to put the brakes on a plan to build a $500-million Criminal Justice Center, which would have intensified the over-incarceration of people of color, IndyCAN is working behind the scenes to get the City of Indianapolis to develop a strategy to reduce over-incarceration before planning any new jail facility.

IndyCAN wants the City to:

implement proven diversion programs for the mentally ill, the addicted and the homeless

allow people charged with low-level, non-violent crimes to be released on their own recognizance, rather than having to pay bail or wait in jail until their trials

invest in proven programs that reduce recidivism.

IndyCAN leaders are reaching out to City-County Council President Maggie Lewis, mayoral candidates Chuck Brewer and Joe Hogsett, and other public officials to discuss how we can work together to reduce unnecessary, counter-productive incarceration that hurts families, individuals and our whole community.

SAVE THE DATE: Leadership Assembly is Sept. 1

As the Season of Encounter conversations continues, IndyCAN leaders will gather together at a leadership assembly to share what those conversations have taught us about working across race lines in ways that foster a community of inclusion.

Plan to attend to learn what hundreds of members of the Indianapolis community have shared about building relationships across race, about implicit bias in our lives, and what we can do to stop structural racism.

Ultimately, we will come together to shape a prophetic vision for Indianapolis that moves our city toward racial and economic equity. All of IndyCAN's future campaigns will be developed while keeping in mind what we learn from this assembly.

We will also be sharing the impact of these conversations with mayoral candidates on Saturday, Sept. 19.

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Indianapolis Congregation Action Network and PICO National Network are nonpartisan and are not aligned explicitly or implicitly with any candidate or party. We do not endorse or support candidates for office.